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GREENSBORO — David Finch, who seems as if he’s been on the fairways here since the Sam Snead era, was headed for the buffet table Thursday to fuel up.

A hot, heavy-lifting afternoon loomed for the CBS camera operator, who’s 56. But, as it turned out, his work would be interrupted at the Wyndham Championship by golf’s greatest enemies, thunder and lightning.

After a long delay, Finch was back on the course at 4:30 p.m. driving (a golf cart), getting out, running with hand-held camera, shooting and getting back into the cart. He was zeroing in on the new John Daly, 60 pounds lighter, more colorfully clad and playing a decent round for a change.

Finch works with an organization that operates much like Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Some 22 weeks a year, CBS Sports’ golf production team sets up, tears down and goes to the next stop on the PGA Tour.

The production work is intense. It takes 250 or so people, counting local hires as spotters and technicians, to broadcast a tournament.

Akron last week, Greensboro this week. The crew started arriving Sunday night after the PGA Championship ended in Akron that afternoon.

By Monday, CBS had converted the parking lot across from Sedgefield Country Club’s activity building into a village. It was filled with trucks, trailers, portable toilets and tents.

The setup looks as enormous as in 1996, when Finch was featured in the press hoisting a heavy camera on his shoulder and working up a sweat to reach the right positions for the best shots.

He looks as fit as he did 13 years ago, too. The camera remains weighty, about 35 pounds, but carrying it is easier because of the wireless age.

“We have no cables attacked to the camera,’' he says. “We don’t have to pull cable around the fairways, tripping players and caddies.”

Wireless makes it possible for him to work a hole not scheduled for TV coverage, such as the eighth hole Thursday where Daly hit one of his prodigious drives, 50 yards past his two playing companions.

In the old days of cable lines, TV golf action was limited mostly to the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th holes.

Finch answers to Lance Barrow, coordinating producer for CBS Sports and winner of eight Emmy Awards for his productions.

Barrow and Finch started at CBS the same year, 1977. Barrow spends part of his day in a trailer, in an office that’s pretty much bare except for a desk and two TVs. During broadcast hours he posts himself in the control booth truck making sure a telecast goes smoothly.

New technology may have lightened the load of televising golf in some ways, but Barrow says it hasn’t gotten easier. His crew is fanning out this week over Sedgefield with more than 20 cameras, hand-held and stationary.

“Golf is the hardest sport to do on TV,” Barrow says. “There is more ground to cover. There is more than one ball. No one has a number on his back. There are no timeouts. There is something always going on.”

The trick is knowing when to go to commercial or to stay put and not miss a key moment. That means knowing the players.

Networks realize they had better not go away if, say, Rocco Mediate is about to fire a shot, as he did Thursday from the rough beside the 9th fairway.

Mediate takes one look and — whack! — the ball is on its way. Same with Daly, who spent all of five seconds lining up a birdie putt on the eighth hole.

On the other hand, if Sergio Garcia sizes up a shot, it’s safe to go to commercial. Garcia studies a golf ball and the landscape between him and the green as if it all might show up on a college final.

CBS has been coming to the Greensboro tournament, with the exception of a few years earlier this decade, since at least the early 1980s — maybe even the late ’70s.

Barrow hopes the CBS-Greensboro relationship continues, because he says, the crew feels appreciated here. Some tournaments, Barrow says, have CBS written all over them.

“I feel Greensboro is a CBS tournament,” he says,

Coverage here dates back to Pat Summerall and Ken Venturi in the tower behind the 18th green.

Now, the lead announcers are Jim Nantz and Nick Faldo, although they’re taking this week off. Bill Macatee and former British Open champ Ian Baker-Finch are on the 18th.

Unlike the circus, the CBS crew doesn’t travel by train. They fly, and the gear arrives in seven tractor-trailer rigs.

The crew needs two hotels. The village at the course includes mobile homes for production work, truck trailers, a long row of portable toilets, more than 40 golf carts and a tent where meals are served by a catering team that’s part of the crew,

It’s glamorous work if you’re an on-course announcer. But the more rumpled-looking people, such as Finch, are running along the fairways building up a sweat.

Those working computers and monitors inside the control booths in the village feel the pressure of doing a broadcast right.

During last week’s PGA Championship, the crew was on the air for more than 30 hours, Barrow says. Here it will be on for about 15 hours.

CBS teams with the Golf Channel to telecast Thursday and Friday rounds, seen exclusively on the Golf Channel. CBS goes it alone on the weekend.

What’s next for TV golf. Barrow raves about out the already-arrived high-definition TV. It makes the flight of the ball easier for viewers to follow. The ups and downs of the course are easier to discern. Colors, such as those on Daly’s yellow shirt and yellow plaid pants, are more vivid.

Barrow hesitates to guess what invention is next.

“In our world,” he says, “when something new comes on line, it’s obsolete by that afternoon.”

Obsolescence doesn’t seem a future problem for hustling camera operator Finch, who also covers other sports for the big eye.

Finch figures he’s good for four more years of running and carrying a hand-held camera. Leaving would be tough. He’d miss his co-workers too much.

“It’s a family out here,’' he said. “We live together. We socialize together. We eat together.”

It’s hard labor, he says, but it’s a labor of love.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9873 or beale1@clearwire.net